View from the Bridge: A major renovation of a stodgy old library carves out new space for the public and increases the building's engagement with the city.
The New Bodleian Library in the historic center of Oxford had for years been so unfashionable as to be all but invisible. Designed in the mid-1930s by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960) in a stripped-down classical style, and not completed until 1946, it was already a throwback at a time when modernism was rising. Although its rough-textured golden-stone facades became blackened with dirt, and its entrance was always difficult to find, it was nonetheless well proportioned and detailed, sitting on a prominent one-acre corner site. It was just opposite two of this ancient university town’s architectural jewels: the 17th-century Sheldonian Theater by Christopher Wren and the early 18th-century Clarendon Building by Wren’s onetime assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor. Scott’s dowdier building deliberately did not attempt to compete with those masterworks. Yet now, after a $124 million upgrade by architects WilkinsonEyre, it has been turned into a cultural asset for the city. Reborn as the Weston Library, it dares to open up the flank facing its illustrious forbears and has at last become visible.
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